Liandry's Torment: (2900g)
70 Ability Power
200 Health
Passive: UNIQUE - Eyes of Pain: 15 Magic Penetration
Passive: UNIQUE - Dealing magical spell damage burns enemies for 5% of their current health as magic damage over 3 seconds. If their movement is impaired, they take double damage from this effect. Multi-target or periodic effects deals 2.5% over 1.5 seconds. 300 max damage vs monsters.
Before we dive into discussion, let's get a few quirky mechanics out of the way.
First, Liandry's periodic damage ticks every half second. This will become important in later discussion.
Second, Liandry's periodic damage does not refresh like Teemo's Toxic Shot or Nautilus' Titan's Wrath, but resets. If you deal damage which would proc Liadry's milliseconds before a tick would have occurred you lose that tick of damage forever.
Third, Liandry's does not proc from on-hit effects. The aforementioned Toxic Shot and Titan's Wrath are good examples of Magic Damage that will not proc Liandry's.
The practical upshot of the first two mechanics is that it is very, very easy to lose ticks of Liandry's damage, especially with colliding periodic damage sources. Even with just one periodic damage ability ticking every second Liandry's will only tick once before it is reset, dramatically reducing its potential damage. Whereas you might have expected nine ticks from Teemo's Noxious Trap, in fact you only get six.
Despite that, Liandry's does appear to have a lot of potential. For one, the damage is independent of ability rank, so running into Rank 1 Nidalee traps will yield the same benefit from Liandry's passive as Rank 5. Liandry's also has Flat Magic Penetration, an extremely valuable stat with Season 3's changes. Finally, it's not lacking on the Ability Power front either. It's expensive, and a lot of its cost goes toward the passive, but as an upgrade to Haunting Guise it seems a worthy item.
Which brings us to the controversy. It's very, very hard for most of the champions that favor Liandry's to discern the value of that passive. As a result there's an ongoing debate as to whether it's worth upgrading Haunting Guise into Liandry's early, or if it should be put off until later, or even if it should be built at all. This is an extremely difficult argument because Liandry's damage is very difficult to math out and account for, not only because of the complicated ways you can lose ticks, but also because its damage depends heavily on how much damage has already been done to a target. It's likely that the debate over Liandry's will continue for some time before anything resembling a consensus is reached.
Overall, however, it's a fairly effective item provided you aren't attempting to burst down an opponent. It also has one of the smoothest build paths of any Ability Power item, as every component is cheap and you never need to dedicate more than two slot at a time toward its construction. Haunting Guise makes for a good early item whether you intend on finishing Liandry's now or later. If you're going to be poking at enemy champions and/or laying traps, Liandry's can be very effective.
Teemo is currently the poster-Yordle for Liandry's due to the minefields of mushrooms he leaves across the map. Because they not only deal damage but slow the half-damage effect for periodic damage is cancelled out. The resulting damage adds up to roughly 5% of a target's current health, which is nothing to sneeze at. While he's currently the king of Liandry's users, Nidalee, Ziggs, and Xerath are other champions that make excellent use of the item.
Liandry's passive may not be as exciting as some of the active abilities we've seen, but it still conforms with Riot's goal to shift itemization away from a cut and dried comparison of stats, and into less objective debates about the merits of utility.
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